Online dating, Facebook, and Twitter have expanded the ways people form relationships, romantic or not. Photograph: Frank Baron

It's practically a law: every few months, a major media outlet has to publish an anxious piece about "Women Today".

Women today are abandoning marriage; they're dying to get married. Women today can't balance work and family; they aren't having enough babies. Women today are doing better than men; women today can't have it all. The underlying theme is always the same: women today are miserable.

The latest play on this theme comes from the style section of the New York Times (the worst offender in the genre, except perhaps the Atlantic and the Daily Mail). The Times article asks if we are currently seeing "The End of Courtship?" (the implied answer, of course, is a resounding "yes"). Unfortunately, the Times is several decades late in discovering the demise of courtship.

The days when a man selected a woman for his mate and, by offering material gifts and a promise of marriage, "wooed her" are long gone. They were gone when my parents dated, my grandparents even. And thank goodness: the woman didn't get a whole lot of say in the courtship system; she was supposed to just be happy that someone was buying her things, and could take her off her father's hands.

No, the Times article is talking about the demise of dating. Fortunately, they needn't worry so much.

Despite the Times' hand-wringing, dating is still alive and well. It's just done slightly differently than it was a generation ago – much as that generation did things differently than the one before it, and on and on. Single people today have both changing gender roles and technology to fully skeeve out the folks who think that "change" is synonymous with "bad".

And make no mistake, things have changed. We have cellphones, which facilitate last-minute get-togethers. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook let you connect with a wide variety of people, and you can know someone's political leanings, interests, and hobbies before you ever meet in person. Online dating opens up a marketplace of singles, so you no longer have to rely only on your immediate social network to find a person of interest.

As with anything else, there are benefits and demerits to these advances. If your goal is to be fancily courted and then married at 22, that's certainly harder today than it was 50 years ago. But if your goal is to live a varied life, to learn about yourself through a variety of relationships, romantic and not, and to develop reasonably fully as a human being before you settle down, then there has never been a better time to be alive (especially as a woman).

Change is always scary, and I am sure plenty of commentators throughout history whined that the warmth of fire wasn't as satisfying as body heat, the flushing toilet less authentic than the chamber pot, the buggy not nearly as charming as the covered wagon. But alas, things change; humanity moves forward and adjusts. Young college students "pinning" their girlfriends in the 1950s was not exactly a centuries-old tradition. A more authentic marriage proposal – being sold into matrimony by your father, and taking few rights with you – is one that I'm sure most women are happy to leave behind.

So, why this yearning for a past that, if it ever even existed, was only around for a short time? I suspect it's because rules, in many ways, are easier than freedom. Clearly delineated roles, no matter how suffocating, are simpler to navigate than a wide-open plain of choices and options.

Choices and options mean responsibility and possibility. They mean taking the reins of your own life. They mean things might sometimes be harder, but that the rewards might also be greater – might, might not.

That's terrifying.

And so we cling to a soft-focus ideal of yesteryear, when life was simple and we paired off easily, blushing on first dates before floating into domestic bliss.

Of course, that's not at all how it actually worked. The feminist gains of the 1960s and 70s were a reaction to those "blissful" 1950s. Women wanted their own bank accounts, the right to marry whom they pleased, a college education, a fulfilling career, control over when they had children, and the chance to pursue what they found inspiring. Lo and behold, women today are doing better than ever – especially the ones who graduate from college and marry later in life.

Feminist victories mean that women can enter into partnerships more equally. More egalitarian relationships tend to be more stable; partners in them have more sex; and the male partners tend to spend more time with their children. These pairings don't look like courtship, but they're good.

Today's communication platforms also offer a wider variety of connections. Just looking at my immediate social circle, social media and gender equality have played a defining role: we've met long-term partners at professional conferences, through Twitter connections ("Hey, we've been tweeting at each other and I'm in town, wanna grab a drink?"), Facebook friends-of-friends, and online dating.

All of those media have their flaws, and in some instances, of course, filtering intimacy through the glow of a computer screen kills it – just as getting to know someone's myriad flaws up close and personal can kill an infatuation. But overall, a wider network seems better than a narrower one. More options may delay the process of picking one, but it seems to improve the chances of picking the right one, instead of simply settling for what's in front of you.

Before it sounds like I'm Pollyanna-ish about dating, let me be clear: I am 29, single, with a law degree and a writing career that takes up many of my waking hours (and formerly, a corporate legal career that took up many more of my waking hours, and quite a few of my sleeping ones). I am exactly the kind of woman who would wear a very severe bun in the first half of a romantic comedy. If you believe style section profiles, I should be mystified by dating rituals, cynical about my marriage prospects, and dedicated to spending the wee hours of any given Tuesday night downing Chardonnay and creating elaborate Pinterest wedding boards.

And yet, I think dating today is mostly great. Every single woman I know, including myself, goes on dates regularly. We have active and wonderful social circles. We complain about how hard it is to find love – and yet, that difficulty is exactly what makes love so special and desirable. We're open to romance, but we aren't crying over episodes of Say Yes to the Dress. Sometimes, a retro vision of dating makes it seem like an old-school model would be better, but I'm not sure any of us would actually make that trade.

With all of the social changes that have permeated the last century, there seems to be one constant: dating is hard. Love stinks, except when it doesn't.